fortune and fame unknown, whose great "bounty" was only a tear, is as
completely anonymous as the ploughman or the rude forefathers.

The somber aspects of evening are perhaps more steadily preserved by
Gray than by his contemporaries. From Milton to Joseph Warton all
poets had made their ploughman unwearied as (to quote Warton):

He jocund whistles thro' the twilight groves.

With Gray all this blithe whistling stopped together. Evening poems by
Dyer, Warton, and Collins had tended to be "pretty," but here again
Gray resisted temptation and regretfully omitted a stanza designed to
precede immediately the epitaph:

There scatter'd oft, the earliest of ye Year
By hands unseen, are Show'rs of Violets found;
The Red-breast loves to build & warble there,
And little Footsteps lightly print the Ground.

With similar critical tact Gray realized that one might have too much
of stately moral reflections unmixed with drama. Possibly such an
idea determined him in discarding four noble quatrains with which he
first designed to end his poem. After line 72 in the manuscript now in
Eton College appeared these stanzas:

The thoughtless World to Majesty may bow
Exalt the brave, & idolize Success
But more to Innocence their Safety owe
Than Power & Genius e'er conspired to bless